Java Memory Leaks

Interesting articles

Plugging memory leaks with weak references - Part 1

Plugging memory leaks with weak references - Part 2

How to do what you love

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

Work and Time

Work expands to fill the time available.
-- Cyril Northcote Parkinson, "The Economist", 1955

KMail and missing spam buttons

After upgrading to 3.5 I faced another problem: kmail spam buttons (to classify as spam or ham) are no longer available in its toolbar. They are very important to classify spam emails and now I have to use the context menu. After searching for bug reports, I found one for it, but the proposed workaround does not work for me. I hope we can fix that soon.

KDE and hard disks on the desktop

Upgrading to KDE 3.5 introduced a problem for me. No longer my partitions were displayed on the desktop, what was something very convenient for me. The USB drive, CD and floppy drives still worked, but no hard disk. But finally, after sometime searching how to solve this problem, I found a solution: simply add hal user to disk group and everything works perfectly :-)

StringTokenizer and empty tokens

If you need StringTokenizer to work with empty tokens, check this implementation. I need that to keep track of which cell the data was from (in a CSV file) and this implementation was exactly what I needed.

Eclipse WTP and SSL certificates

Using Web Services Explorer is a very good tool to test web services during development. However, if you want to test a web services that uses a secure server, Web Services Explorer still does not provide an extensive support for that, like what happens with regular web browsers. You will probably have this error:

IWAB0135E An unexpected error has occurred.
IOException
sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

To solve it, it is necessary to import the server certificate into your $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/cacerts file. To do that, make a backup of this file and use the Java keytool. Here has a better description of how to use it.

Enabling SSL in Eclipse WTP

If you want to enable SSL in Eclipse Web Tools Project and you already have a server defined, you must delete and recreate the server. It makes a copy of the $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml at the creation time and does not update the file when you update the source configuration. Therefore, even if you enable SSL in your $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml, it won't be enabled in WTP. After recreating, everything works.

This behaviour is not desired, but that the way it still works, one year after a post in the Eclipse newsgroup about it.

Citizen and the government

When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: "Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.". It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.

Henry Hazlitt - "Economics in One Lesson"

Just finished this book. Excellent book on economics concepts and fallacies. Although it was written in the 40s, it is very current. I am very grateful to a friend of mine for this suggestion.

Quote - Drucker

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. -- Peter Drucker

Music and Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake. - Friedrich Nietzsche.